Jane Wynyard moves around a lot. When we speak, she is in Nairobi checking in with the Save the Elephants charity. On another day, I might have caught her in the wilderness of Samburu, a seven-hour drive north of the Kenyan capital, surrounded by elephants, impalas, giraffes, cheetahs and hyenas. She works in a research camp there, taking photographs and working as a communications consultant.
Her bush lodgings in Samburu are basic: there’s a bucket shower – the water heated by the sun in a jerry can – and a pit toilet. But she’s often on the road, travelling from Kenya to Namibia or Uganda, or anywhere she is wanted to tell the story of what is happening to African wildlife and appealing to the world for their help.
Although Africa is a long way from Auckland, where Wynyard, 54, spent most of her childhood, it’s even further from the glitzy world she inhabited until seven years ago.
She moved to London in her early 30s, and quickly became head of communications for Hearst Magazines, publisher of Harper’s Bazaar and Elle among others, so there was always an awards dinner or power breakfast to keep her in corporate fettle. Then she moved to Net-a-Porter, at the time the most ultra-fashionable online boutique in the world.
As global head of public relations, publishing and media, she led a very high-end existence, working with brand-name photographers and stylists, featuring luxurious labels, with almost constant travel and entertainment always on expenses. She spent many weekends riding horses in Hampshire, or flying to Morocco to go surfing. Yet, somehow the luxury lifestyle “just didn’t feel like me”.
She suspects she might have still been jumping in and out of black cabs if life hadn’t hit her right in the guts. Her beloved stepbrother, Marc, was suddenly dead at 52, given just six weeks’ notice of the cancer that would kill him.
“It was a real shock, a terrible shock. And I started thinking, gosh, life is so short. Am I really doing what I want to do? At first it was, keep going, keep going. But another part was thinking I should be doing my own stuff. You know, I’m a journalist by trade, and I love photography.”
Then came another family blow. Her cousin, Kiwi-born Liz Frood, an associate professor of Egyptology at Oxford University, suddenly got seriously ill. Diagnosis of sepsis was very late and she almost died. Both of her legs were amputated below the knees and her hands were very badly damaged too.
“I spent the two weeks in ICU with her and her husband and her 11-month-old baby, and after that I would come down to stay and help every weekend. Again, it made me think, ‘What am I doing with my life? It’s so short, don’t waste it.’ I needed to change and I needed to get away from the consumerism and be true to myself.”
She became involved with the Sepsis Trust through her cousin’s illness, and this, too, added to the need to reassess her future. Frood, meanwhile, started on the long road to recovery, including being fitted with prosthetic limbs, and is now back at work full-time, lecturing overseas and fronting BBC documentaries.
On the road to self-discovery, Wynyard hired a life coach and went on a retreat in Italy. “I knew that there was more to life than the nine to five, climbing the career ladder, and all of that sort of stuff. If there was one thing that this retreat taught me it was that if you don’t fit comfortably with society’s rules, you can ignore them. You just need to be brave and believe in yourself. Not for nothing was it called the F--- It Retreat.”
Challenged to say what it was she really wanted to do, she said, “I’m going to become a wildlife photographer, I’m going to go and spend time in Africa, and I’m going to photograph wildlife and national reserves. And I’m going to use all my journalistic and communications experience to be creative myself, and to give back in a way I haven’t been able to before.”
In some ways, Wynyard’s break-out from the corporate track harks back to early working life. Born and brought up in Auckland’s eastern suburbs, she spent time with her family in Vancouver and Southern California, where her stepfather taught at universities. Back home as a teenager, she boarded at New Plymouth Girls High School until she was offered a cadetship at the Taranaki Daily News. “I had always wanted to be a journalist, from about the age of six.”
After eight years on the paper, she moved to Wellington and started working in public relations and communications for the New Zealand International Festival of the Arts and the Royal New Zealand Ballet at the end of the 1990s. When she moved to London, she continued in communications roles.
She first visited Africa as a tourist in 2003. “I always knew Africa would be for me. The first film I ever saw, when I was about five, was Born Free. I was always mad on reading National Geographic, grew up with Wilbur Smith.” Through London contacts, she also holidayed on the coast of Kenya, going on safari to the Maasai Mara or Tsavo reserves. “I just completely fell in love with Kenya.”
Becoming jungle Jane
It took eight months to finally leave her fashion PR career in London and make the move to Africa. She started by signing up for photography courses, then spending every weekend in the counties outside London photographing what accounts for wildlife in the gentle English countryside. She also had to keep her nerve.
The retreat had given her the confidence to express what had been with her for years. “[It] gave me the strength and the confidence to say, ‘I can do this.’ I remember sitting at work looking at other photographers’ work and I was like, wow, I wish I could do that. But why couldn’t I do that? It really woke me up. It was therapeutic, and gave me the tools I needed. But I’m not going to lie: I was really scared.”
Wynyard handed in her notice and went to Kenya to photograph elephants, then Namibia to volunteer with cheetah and hyena research projects, also photographing the wildlife she saw. She returned to London for the next step, which was setting up her own PR business. But over the next few months, she realised she no longer wanted to be anywhere else but in Kenya, and preferably in the bush.
She had been very taken with the charity and research organisation Save the Elephants, and was thrilled when she was offered an internship with them. After some time photographing gorillas in Rwanda for a story on the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund’s 50th anniversary, she went back to Kenya. As a non-citizen, she had to apply to the government for a G-class permit (consultancy/business) to work there. Now, as Jungle Jane Communications, she earns a living as a consultant to charities, offering strategic communications, photography, storytelling and content production.
She earns about a third of what she previously banked, and the designer wardrobe is in long-term storage. In the field, her days are spent in T-shirts, shorts or combat trousers and flip-flops, and laundry is done by hand, using water pumped from a river. None of her new life is difficult, she says. It’s just very different.
Living in the bush, she does have to be careful of her own welfare – trepidation not so much about wildlife such as lions and hippos, but rather mosquitoes and malaria. She recently had appendicitis and was treated in a Nairobi hospital. “I had some of the best healthcare I have ever had anywhere in the world,” she says, proudly.
Competing for resources
The focus of the Save the Elephants research camp is on researching the behaviour and ecology of wild African elephants in order to work out ways to protect them and encourage a more harmonious future between elephants and humans. Poaching, which over decades killed well over 100,000 elephants, has hugely reduced in recent years. In 2021, the Kenya Wildlife Service reported a near 96% decline in poaching in the decade to 2020, from 386 elephant killed in 2013 to 11 in 2020. Wynyard says this was from a combination of law enforcement, the work of conservation organisations, government willpower and – critically – the ban on the sale of ivory in China.
The biggest problem now is human-elephant conflict, which varies widely from one region to another.
“Where I’m based, in Samburu, it’s very much about herders competing with elephants over resources such as water and access to grass for their cattle,” says Wynyard.
“Herdsmen may, out of fear or ignorance, shoot the elephants because they’re in the way, so it has been a really tense time for both wildlife and the communities that live there.”
Cattle are the currency of Samburu tribes- people, and the current drought makes the conflict over resources even more critical.
“We’re trying to change hearts and minds, to encourage local people to see elephants as valuable.
“Elephants bring tourists, which help support the area. They’re incredibly intelligent, with a really strong family bond, but if you’re a herdsman or a family of five and an elephant comes and breaks your hut to get to your food, that’s obviously going to infuriate you. It’s a very complicated issue.”
Asked to evaluate her contribution to the cause, she says she believes she has helped raise the profile of the Mama Tembos – Samburu women monitoring wildlife corridors in northern Kenya – and inspired some international donors to give.
“I like to think my work is helping to raise awareness globally about the challenges facing wild African elephants … and shining a spotlight on the incredible people at the front line of conservation.”
She enthuses about the people she has met in Kenya. “I’ve made lots of friends in both Samburu and the capital. In Nairobi, it’s a really eclectic mix of international people. And the creative talent among the Kenyans is just fantastic. The photographers, the filmmakers and fashion designers that I’ve worked with have been really amazing. I’d love to get them all out on the world stage – they’d blow you away.”
But it can also be emotionally tough. “Nothing quite prepares you for the death of a wild, fatally injured elephant. It’s like watching a human being die – the death rattle, the way the elephant looks at you, your helplessness in not being able to save this magnificent, intelligent creature … I cry every time.”
However, there’s no stopping her now in the role she has carved out for herself. l
